


Wrapped in You

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Fever Dreams, M/M, No plot and no porn either, Sharing Clothes, Sickfic, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 02:16:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16108691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Finn gets sick while Poe's away, but Poe's still with him, sort of.





	Wrapped in You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [orchis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orchis/gifts).



> I'm tired and overwhelmed and having a hard time, hence this story. 
> 
> Prompt from Orchis, to whom this is warmly dedicated. Love you bb.

One of the advantages of having a near-Jedi for a best friend is that she can catch you before you hit the floor.

“Finn, you're relieved of duty,” said D'Acy, one of the few people left in the Resistance who still bothered saying things like that. Finn shook his head, which was a mistake, not just because it hurt but because the shaking didn't stop when his head stopped moving. Dorrance said, “Go to fucking medical, we got it from here,” much more in keeping with the way most people in the Resistance talked to each other now, and Rey said, “I'll walk him.”

Her...whatever she did...held him up through the corridors of the old science station, and her presence at his side felt somehow cool, like the other side of the pillow when you turn it over. Pillows hadn't been part of Finn's life for all that long, but they were now seeming like a particularly good idea.

“You feel awful,” Rey stated, and he wasn't sure whether she meant to him or to her. “Sorry I didn't notice before.”

To her, then. “There's kind of a lot going on,” he managed, and his voice sounded hoarser and weaker than he expected it to.

Yelene the medic looked down his throat, listened to his chest, felt around under his chin (which he almost broke her hand about, but was able to catch himself) and took his temperature, diagnosed eremini fever, gave him a packet of febrifuges and prescribed a liquid diet, cautioned him about aural sensivitity, and packed him off to his quarters. Rey moved about the chamber, tucking a wide-bottomed flask into the bedside niche, vanishing and returning with an extra blanket. “That's yours.”

“I'll be fine,” she said. “You need to keep warm when you're sick. Everybody knows that.” Her voice echoed in his ears, hammered the inside of his skull. _Aural sensitivity,_ right. On the margin of the vibrating, membraneous pain that filled his head, he was aware that whatever everybody knew or didn't know, it was still a big deal for Rey to give something of hers to another person, even to him. She squeezed his shoulder through his blanket and hers. “Be back later.”

“Can you tell them that I think the Wenrow option is the best unless we get new--” _intel between now and tomorrow,_ he was about to say, but the shakes seized him and he had to clench his teeth against them. The links of the metal mesh door clashed against each other behind her, and he wanted to cover his ears but his arms were too weak to lift. Tears leaked from his eyes and onto the pillow he'd been longing for.

Finn slept, probably. Woke, groped his way along the corridor to the fresher, groped his way back, dry-swallowed the pills that were meant to bring his temperature down, sought sleep again. The room was empty, except for him and his fever. Except for the bed and the bench seat that folded out of the wall, the webbing that held their spare clothes and Poe's old helmet and their sidearms when they weren't in the field. Empty of Poe, who was in the field now. Finn didn't know what to call the visions of Poe bleeding out, Poe under torture, Poe frozen and adrift—not hallucinations. He wasn't delirious, just afraid.

When he sweat through his shirt, Finn staggered over to the wall and pawed at the netting, because Rey had said _keep warm._ He touched the thick, stretchy fabric of one of Poe's shirts, an overshirt with a hood to it, in bright flightsuit orange. People razzed Poe about it, asking if they'd missed the all-call, wanting to know why anyone would wear that color voluntarily, inquiring if he wore it on undercover missions. Finn wasn't sure what made some colors worse than others. Just having them around seemed pretty good to him.

The lining was soft. It smelled like Poe. It felt like being held. He draped his own sweat-soaked shirt over the bench seat to dry and went back to bed.

Rose came by a few hours or years later with a soup pack. “Hey,” she said. “Nice shirt.”

Her voice was like metal scraping on metal, and he flinched when he heard it, and she saw him flinch. “What is it?” she said. “Finn?”

“Please don't talk,” he croaked. “Loud.” But he forgot to whisper, and his own voice, echoing somewhere in the back of his neck, was even worse.

She got it immediately, even slicing the spout open with her belt laser so it wouldn't pop, and held the pack where he could reach it. Finn couldn't taste much and he wasn't all that hungry, but the heat felt good in his throat.

Rose made as if to say something and then pulled out her datapad and typed, fingers arching and ducking like baby porgs scrabbling for drupemites in the _Falcon's_ insulation: SENDING FULL REINFORCEMENTS TO WENROW LIKE YOU SAID. NEGOTIATIONS W TUPERE GOING OK. SAFE CONDUCT THRU SYSTEM + SOME NONCOMBATANT PERSONNEL. HAGGLING ABT NUMBERS.

Finn nodded, fighting a wave of nausea and tearing up again. He stood it as long as he could, but the letters were swimming. Eventually she started, again, to say something, caught herself, patted the back of his hand briskly, and left.

The people in the next chamber were talking, and their voices burst and grated. People were walking—not running, at least it wasn't that, at least there was nothing to run about—and their footsteps echoed and shattered. His eyes lit on the old helmet again, a spot of orange and dirty white.

One of the donations they got when the Resistance began to rally was a set of new helmets—not state of the art, but last year's model and a wild improvement on the ones they'd been using in both protection and communication. If you went down in X-wing combat there wasn't usually enough of your head left to hit, but the new cushioning was better protection against turbulence and non-combustive impact, and the sound filters, the pilots agreed, were much better.

Sound filters. Poe hadn't thrown the old helmet away because the Resistance wasn't in a position to throw anything away. Finn wasn't clear why that meant it had to be in their room, but right now what he was thinking was that the inside was probably soft enough for someone who wasn't moving very much and that the ear protection was probably strong enough for things that weren't _actually_ an X-wing engine.

He had to use the wall to get around the room to where the webbing was.

He put the helmet on, and quiet descended.

Finn made his way back around the wall. He drank some water before he sat down, then lay down, gathering the covers and the quiet around him. Everything was muffled, padded, dark. He slept.

More days and nights passed like light-years, like glaciers or great waves rolling over him, dreaming that Poe was touching him, dreaming that Poe was lost. Kylo Ren with a bloody mouth, General Hux with bloody hands, Rey bawling like a new recruit, stars streaming past. He woke and pissed and drank more water, or the occasional soup pack left by the people who came in to check on him and tell him things about the Wenrow front (cautiously optimistic) and the Tupere negotiations (stalled out) and a new offer of assistance from a coalition of mining worlds, and went back to sleep.

Eventually, he felt well enough to think to pull the neck of the shirt up over his nose and warm his face and inhale for more of Poe's scent.

And even more eventually, Poe came back to him (with dark under-eye circles and a bacta patch just visible in the V of his shirt and hair recently combed) and asked, “What are you wearing my helmet for?”

“Oh,” Finn said. He'd forgotten he had it on, and Poe's voice was muffled by it in the ordinary way: the sensitivity had passed. “Ear protection. I don't need it now.”

“You look good in it,” Poe said, but he lifted the helmet off gently, and kissed Finn's brow, and put the helmet back in the wall netting. “I'll get you sick,” Finn said as Poe lay down behind him and pressed up close.

“No you won't. I had eremini when I was a kid. Once you get it, you're immune.” Poe rubbed his nose against the back of Finn's ear. “You never have to feel like this again, how's that sound?”

He shifted again to take a deep, dramatic sniff of Finn's neck. “Mmm, that's good, that's what I like. It's been _weeks_ since I got to smell you. Way too long.”

“That's your smell,” Finn said. “This is your shirt. It smells like you, that's why I put it on. That and I was cold.”

“It must've worn off. It just smells like you to me now.”

Finn put his face all the way inside the neck of the shirt, like he'd been doing. He could smell his own skin, true, more than due for a wash, but Poe's smell was still noticeable, still as warm and heavy and comforting as the soft orange fabric. “I guess it's both,” he said, emerging, and was completely staggered when Poe rolled away from him and said, “Oh _no_. _”_

“What? What happened?”

“I can't _believe_ this.” Poe sounded really tragic; it was the way he sounded when there was nothing but ration bars three food shipments in a row, but it was also the way he sounded when something was medium-seriously wrong, so Finn wasn't sure what to think. “It's our smell _together,_ that's what it is, that's the thing that makes me feel like I'm at home.”

“Why,” Finn asked very carefully, “is that bad?”

“It's what I would make up if I was trying to sound like a holonovela. It's romantic but it's like, _extra-_ romantic, like you'd say it in a goofy voice to make fun of being romantic. Only I don't even get to say it as a joke because it's _actually what's happening--”_

“I hope you're right about being immune to this,” Finn said, and wriggled around in Poe's arms and kissed him for the first time in centuries, feeling like maybe someday soon his body could be a site of something besides pain and weariness.

“Not immune to _that,”_ Poe said when they pulled apart. “Never was, never will be. Want me to help you go clean your teeth?”

“Fuck you,” Finn said, the total senseless happiness he felt undermining the pretended insult. His mouth _was_ stale, and Poe was back. 

“Oh, believe me,” Poe said. “The minute you're feeling better.”

 


End file.
